All Saints Messenger - July 20, 2017

Wheat or weed, that is the question. Well, it's one possible question. Contemporary rhetoric--from casual conversation to "official" speechmaking--suggests that most people consider themselves to be wheat and others to be troublesome weeds. We may even be eager to eradicate the weeds. However, God's farming practices are unusual indeed. Thank God for that, for surely we are all likely someone else's weed on the verge of being uprooted by overeager weeders.

This brings to mind our recent journey to Jerusalem. Within the walls of Old Jerusalem you find a small city divided into four quarters: The Jewish, The Christian, The Muslim & The Armenian. As one moves closer to the center, where these four different communities, culture, people and faith come together you can feel a tension rising. The sights, sounds and smells are much more noticeable as if they are in conflict with all the others. The fact is that they are. Yet, this conflict does not have to be bad...I found it to be a time and place of new sensory and personal growth allowing me to better and more fully understand and appreciate the other.

In appreciation of this new found realization I come to this reading with new and fresh eyes. Our job seems to be to live into the kingdom that reflects God's gracious, if not unusual, farming practices by learning to live in the field in which wheat and weed grow together. The job of discerning who is wheat and who is weed is ultimately not ours anyway. When God determines it is harvest time, God will determine how we all will be gathered. I, for one, am grateful to take something off my "to do" list and to leave the tasks of harvest up to such a gracious God.

God of wheat and weeds, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.